Eric Kow wrote:
I see. I guess the resources are very scattered. There's the Darcs wiki,
Camp, the darcs manual and the wiki book. :-(
Yep. My take on it:
- the darcs manual is official but old, and missing discussion on darcs 2
- the darcs wiki is broad, but shallow
- the wikibook tries to be friendly, but isn't rigorous and probably
gets on people's nerves. Plus it's horribly incomplete
- the camp documentation is new and quite thorough (although it doesn't
explicitly cover darcs 2)
- Jason's thesis is clear and introduces the patch theory stuff, but it
doesn't go into that much detail
Perhaps some of these can be combined so that at least they are on the
same website. Though I don't see why the wiki, the wikibook and camp
cannot be combined. Are the Camp guys the same as the Darcs guys? It is
perfectly reasonable for Darcs to have a "research" branch called Camp.
Short answer: the manual
Do you have write access to the manual? Do you have control over it?
Long answer:
I believe there are two kinds of work to be done: The first is to cut
down on the proliferation of incomplete resources.
I agree. I think it just makes things harder to find.
This could consist
of a lot of pruning bits off everything (for example, recognising that
some chapters in the wikibook might never be written, and just pointing
them to an official source instead), or just marking discussions as
being old and obsolete as needed.
We could try to merge some of the existing work into one larger body and
then delete the originals. So there is something closer to a one-stop
place for information. Btw, I'm thinking about the wiki + wikibook
mostly, and maybe Camp.
I'm not sure what is the right way to go about this. Maybe it could
consist of a great merge, pulling in bits and pieces from the newer
write-ups like Jason's thesis and newer work like Ian's paper (which
does not explicitly describe darcs-2 but covers a lot of the same
ground, which sadly the darcs manual does not seem to).
I agree.
The dream is for somebody else to be able to come up and ask "where can
I learn about patch theory", and we can point them to the One True
Source.
Robert Jordan rulez!... Sorry, got side-tracked :) Yes, I like your
plans a lot.
I hope I'm not making this sound like too daunting a task! If this kind
of shake down is too hard, there is still a lot of on-and-off gardening
we need doing.
Oh no, it's fine, I like where you are going with this. And maybe I can
contribute something. For example, have you given any thought to using a
content management system like Drupal?
I maintain a couple of Drupal sites as part of my daytime job. People
create accounts, you write pages in HTML, you have roles and
permissions. You can make a page that anyone can edit, so it's like a
wiki, or a page that only people with a certain role (e.g. "editor") can
edit.
So, for example, if you don't want everybody to have write access to the
official darcs manual, you could make a separate "community manual" or
"cooker manual" that a lot of people can write to. Every once in a while
you copy and paste a chapter from one to the other (it's just HTML).
Another example: If the Camp guys want to have a section dedicated to
them that other people can't write to, you can give them that.
A Drupal site will also have a menu, a side-bar, pretty URLs and stuff
like that to make navigation easier. Navigation is one of the things
that (IMHO) wikis are not very good at.
I would be happy to setup and do the admin stuff for a Drupal site. A
Drupal doesn't require a lot of admin work, except giving roles to new
users, which we can get someone else to do if I'm not around.
What do you think?
Cheers,
Daniel.
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